Although the Enlightenment seemed to have brought an end to the widely held belief that Jews murdered Christian children for ritual purposes, charges of the so-called blood libel were surprisingly widespread in Central and Eastern Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. Well over one hundred accusations were made against Jews in this period, and prosecutors and government officials in Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia broke with long-established precedent to bring at least six of these cases forward in sensational public trials.
Professor Hillel J. Kieval
In his recently published book Blood Inscriptions, Hillel J. Kieval examines four prosecutions—Tiszaeszlár in Hungary (1882-83), Xanten in Germany (1891-92), Polná in the Bohemian Lands (1899-1900; the infamous Hilsner Affair), and Konitz, then Germany, now in Poland (1900-1902)—to ask how it was that previously discredited beliefs came to seem once again as plausible and even compelling.
He explores how educated elites took up the accusations of Jewish ritual murder and considers the roles played by government bureaucracies, the journalistic establishment, forensic medicine, and modern legal practices in structuring the investigations and trials. The prosecutors, judges, forensic scientists, criminologists, and academic scholars of Judaism and other expert witnesses all worked hard to establish their epistemological authority as rationalists, Kieval contends.
Far from being a throwback to the Middle Ages, these ritual murder trials were in all respects a product of post-Enlightenment politics and culture. Harnessed to and disciplined by the rhetoric of modernity, they were able to proceed precisely because they were framed by the idioms of scientific discourse and rationality.
Hillel Kieval is the Gloria M. Goldstein Professor Emeritus of Jewish History and Thought at Washington University in St. Louis. He received his BA, MA, and PhD from Harvard University, where his studies combined modern European and Jewish history, and where he was a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows.
Professor Kieval has also held faculty positions at the University of Washington (Seattle) and at Brandeis University, as well as visiting appointments at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, the University of Vilnius, the Universidad Hebraica in Mexico City, Charles University in Prague, and the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
Hillel Kieval is a historian of Jewish culture and society in modern Central and Eastern Europe (19th and 20th centuries). His research interests range from pathways of Jewish integration to the impact of nationalism and ethnic conflict on modern Jewish identities, and from cross-cultural conflicts and misunderstandings to the discursive practices of modern antisemitism. His books include Blood Inscriptions: Science, Modernity, and Ritual Murder at Europe’s Fin de Siècle (2022); Prague and Beyond: Jews in the Bohemian Lands (Co-editor, 2022); Languages of Community: The Jewish Experience in the Czech Lands (2000); and The Making of Czech Jewry: National Conflict and Jewish Society in Bohemia, 1870-1918 (1988).
In May 2022, Hillel Kieval was awarded the Silver Medal of the Faculty of Arts, from Charles University of Prague.
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The event is organized by the Society for the History of Czechoslovak Jews with the support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic, the Consulate General of the Czech Republic in New York, the Consulate General of Slovak Republic in New York, the Bohemian Benevolent and Literary Association and the Leo Baeck Institute.
